A study of climate changes in the coastal region: special reference on paddy production in Ampara district

Abstract

Agriculture is a vital sector in Sri Lanka as it plays key role in GDP, export income and total employment. This sector contributes 7.42 percent and 15 percent to GDP and export income in Sri lanka, respectively, and also it provides employment to about 26.1 percent of the labour force exceeding the contribution of any other single sector (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2017). Agricultural production is vulnerable to variation in climate, which affects almost all the regions in the Universal. Using a collective cross-sectional data from major paddy producing regions in Ampara and Sri Lanka, the responsiveness of paddy production to average temperature and rainfall variation was analyzed. This study purposes to examine the relationship between rainfall and paddy production. Samplings from 100 farmer’s households had been gathered by questionnaire survey as primary data and the secondary data. Rainfall data of 135 years and 20 years / 40 seasons paddy cultivation data has been utilized to analyses the result. As the result, the study finds that through the 3, 5 years moving average had shown high drier seasons of the years. The paddy production was very high in Maha season but this was very low in Yala season because of the rainfall variability. Paddy yield under various climate change scenarios. Both average temperature and rainfall have concave, non-monotonic effects upon paddy production, which implies that variations in growing climate are likely to have negative effects on paddy production. It was found that modest increases in average temperature and variation in rainfall had only a small effect of unclear sign, but increases in average temperature beyond 2.010C were likely to have strong negative effects on paddy production. For example, 3.08oC increase in average temperature individually or in combination with changing rainfall can lead to approximately 32% yield drop in Sri Lanka and 26% in study areas of paddy production.